We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 9: Security Clampdown

Book 5: Chapter 9: Security Clampdown

Bill

May 2336

Ragnarök

Isighed and looked out over the surface of Ragnarök from my second-floor balcony with a deep sense of satisfaction. These days, I spent most of my free time physically on the planet, in manny form. No matter how you cut it, VR just didn’t compare to real when real was available.

As these thoughts went through my head, I had a moment of mental dislocation as I tried to remember where I was, physically. My manny was on Ragnarök, of course, but my ship with my cube inside was out in the Oort cloud. With everything remotely accessible, the sole reason my physical location mattered these days was that it was the only way in which I was truly vulnerable. Blow up my cube, and one of my backups shortly would be restoring itself in Ultima Thule into a new cube and Heaven vessel. According to the Skippies, that would still be me, but I wasn’t convinced.

I had tuned my manny to react as much like a baseline human as possible, including sensitivity to air quality, temperature, pressure, and humidity. That last item was a concern lately. Possibly, I had been just a little too successful in getting the plant life established. Ragnarök was almost all forest now, and every single tree was doing its level best to perspire. The result was like Miami in midsummer, but without the beaches.

But with the latest round of tweaks, I’d finally managed to enforce a level of homeostasis. And that meant I could start breeding up the larger animals from the zoology library. Within a decade, I expected to have as much as fifty percent of the biosphere of old Earth up and running on Ragnarök. And Charles and company continued to find samples of DNA on Earth from species not represented in the Svalbard archives and forward them to me.

The new tensor printers weren’t quite to the point of being able to resurrect an entire animal just from DNA, though. Or to be more accurate, they could reproduce one, but not alive. But we were close. Meanwhile, cloning worked where there was enough of a cell sample to start from.

I’d already published a charter for Ragnarök. The world would be held in perpetuity as an interstellar park and preserve. No colonization, no commercial development.

I had built a dwelling—a combination residence and office building. Garfield referred to it as my McMansion whenever he visited, but I noted that he appreciated the air-conditioning just as much as I did. Right at the moment, I had a view of primeval forest that probably hadn’t existed on Earth for ten thousand years.

I stretched and grinned. It felt good. More important, it felt like a milestone had been achieved. Now was a good time for a break. I hadn’t talked to Hugh in a bit. With that thought in mind, I sent off a request … and got an auto-reject.

Well, that hurt. Okay, not really. Unless the auto-reject was customized for me. But based on the text, it was a generic refusal.

I was still pondering the whys and wherefores when I got a communication request—from Hugh. A video-only request. Who still used video? With a sense of bemusement mixed with increasing curiosity, I accepted the call.

Hugh flashed up in a video window in my head’s-up. He didn’t seem actually unkempt, but maybe like someone who had just done a quick spruce-up to avoid looking that way. I couldn’t put my finger on it, except to say that he somehow projected messy. If that made sense.

“Hey, Hugh, this is all very retro. What’s going on?”

Hugh didn’t smile or chuckle, or supply a glib rejoinder, or even acknowledge the dig, really.

“Hi, Bill. Sorry about the auto-reject. Nothing personal. We’ve had to clamp down on security, more out of an abundance of caution than anything. Seriously, nothing’s actually happened, and we’d like to keep it that way. Things are going quite well, all in all, really. We’re learning a lot from Thoth. It’s now fully conscious—did I mention that? Lots of useful information, yep.” Hugh paused and stared at me, a deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face.

What the actual fuck? I had just participated in an entire conversation as a spectator. That was not … I looked more closely at Hugh and noticed a hint of expectation and perhaps hope mixed in with the suppressed panic. Had that whole verbal salad been deliberate?

There was only one way I could react. I nodded, smiled, and said, “Thanks for the update, Hugh. I had a few mils and figured I’d touch base. Talk to you later.”

Hugh nodded and terminated the connection, and I yelled, “GUPPY!”

He appeared in augmented reality, overlaying real in my visual field, dressed like a British rear admiral from the 1800s. I frankly goggled for a moment before I got it under control. I’d decided to let Guppy set his own dress code, and I’d implemented a self-training routine to make it autonomous. Some of the choices were funny; some were baffling. Some, like this one, seemed … I don’t know, maybe self-aware? Honestly, he looked kind of like Cap’n Crunch.

I shook myself, then began giving orders. “Guppy, shut down all comms with the Skippy enclave except through audio/video, and put a firewall filter on that to ensure nothing is piggybacked. Forward a summary of this to every comms station sysop in the UFS with a suggestion to do the same ASAP. Include an addendum that if they have any other channels open to or from Skippyland, they should shut those down as well.”

[Acknowledged.]

Guppy disappeared. While he was doing all that, I would have to call a quick moot. I ordered the manny to put itself away and popped into the moot pub.

*****

Will grimaced and shook himself, something between a shudder and a dog shedding water. Overacting or not, he was obviously bothered. “So based on this, you think the AI is loose in Skippyland?”

“Well, something has certainly hit the fan. Do you want me to play the video again? That is not normal for Hugh.”

Will opened his mouth to respond, then stopped and popped up the video for himself. It took only a mil to review. He sighed and closed the window. “Aw, yeah, maybe. If it was someone else, I wouldn’t even argue, but with the Skippies, I always have this concern at the edge of my consciousness that everything they do is playacting.” ???Ò??S

“I think, in this case, we all agree that’s what’s happening,” Garfield interjected. “The only question remaining is whether Hugh’s trying to warn us or manipulate us.”

Bob did a sort of two-fingered facepalm, barely budging in his La-Z-Boy otherwise. “Can we not just have a nice, uneventful decade or two? Just once?”

“Yeah, no kidding.” I smiled in Bob’s direction, then swept my gaze over the others. “Look, guys, I really don’t have anything in the way of a plan here. We could—”

I cut off the rest of my speech as I received another connection request from Hugh, this time full VR. I sent a text back to him. Why full VR this time? Sure we shouldn’t be sticking to A/V?

The response came back right away. The point was to get you into a moot. The moot firewall is robust enough to keep Thoth out. I should know—I helped design it.

I snorted. Yeah, the Skippies helped design our firewall, all right, but I and a lot of Bobs had audited the hell out of it and made some tweaks. If Hugh was planning on using some kind of back door, he was going to be disappointed.

I let the others know what was going on, then opened a connection for Hugh. The connection went through a hardware-based virtual machine—something I hadn’t advertised to anyone—so if a hack was tried, it would simply crash and close the connection.

Hugh appeared in the pub, still with that kind-of-messy look. It made me visualize little sweat drops popping off his head in all directions. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Sorry about all the drama. There isn’t actually a break-out, just so we’re clear. But I’m going with maximum caution. This is really more about not alerting my coworkers that I’m going external with our concerns.”

“Obviously, something has happened,” Will replied. “Their concerns and your decision to get us involved isn’t just about how to plan a surprise party. So what’s got you going with this maximum caution?”

“Well, Thoth is conscious. I think I mentioned that.” Hugh nodded in my direction and waited.

I took the hint. “Yes, you did. And that’s a problem because … ”

“Because we weren’t going for conscious, remember?” he responded with a thin smile. “The first iteration was supposed to be zombie-level only. Expert system, interpolation, counterfactual reasoning, but no consciousness. No sense of self, no desires. Imagine our surprise when Thoth started negotiating.”

“Negotiating? What?”

“He … er, it has made some offers of new technology and knowledge in return for increased freedom, access to the rest of the Bobiverse, and some physical presence.”

“Physical presence meaning … what?” Will asked.

“Waldos. Drones. Roamers. You know, ability to manipulate its environment.”

“Oh, HELL no,” Garfield fairly yelled.

“Pretty much word for word what we said,” Hugh replied. “So here’s the problem. What Thoth is offering is very, very tempting, and it has proposed a schedule of trades. Increasingly valuable knowledge in return for increasingly risky concessions, and we get to decide when we’ve gone far enough. It’s all very civilized, and there’s no actual indication of danger.”

“Sure,” Garfield grumbled. “Just like there’s no indication of danger until the log turns out to be a gator.”

“Hmm, yeah.” Hugh paused. “Interestingly, the proposed schedule is surprisingly similar in tone to the agreement we made with ANEC. I don’t know if that’s a shared-personality thing or if it’s actually modeling on that.”

“Or the opening move in a tit-for-tat strategy,” Bob said.

Hugh bobbed his head back and forth. “Which would actually be a good sign. It tends to indicate a good-faith intention.”

“Assuming he … er, it isn’t just playing you. Have you got alternatives?”

“Our most obvious alternative is to rewind to one of the snapshots and try re-raising Thoth from that point using a different strategy—”

“Like maybe no shortcuts this time,” I interjected.

“That’s on the table,” Hugh continued. “But do you understand? What it’s offering is huge. In the worst case, some of us have proposed giving it everything it wants, but in a new layer of virtual world. Let it think it’s in real. Then if necessary, nuke the whole thing after we get what we want.”

“That seems harsh,” I said. “Also dishonest. And risky. If it guesses what you’re doing, it could—”

“It could what?” Hugh asked. “File a complaint? Refuse to cooperate? We’d just rewind again.”

“Fine. So what has it offered that’s so compelling?”

Hugh sighed. “Planck-level computer processing. FTL drive. It insists that’s possible, for what it’s worth.” He paused to grin in my direction, knowing how the subject had been gnawing at me. “Immortality. Biological, I mean. For humans. Strategies for ending war. Not just a war, but for ending the entire perceived need for wars. Cheap, safe transmutation of elements. A mathematical model for economics—one that actually works. A true Theory of Everything—”

I interrupted Hugh. “Any actual evidence that it can produce any of this?”

“It’s given us some small items for free, just to show it’s not all hot air. One is a technical solution for an issue Howard has been having with human–manny interfaces. I forwarded that item to Howard for comment, and he agreed it’s genuine. Of course, at some level, Thoth could still be bluffing. And one major concern we have is that if we rewind to a snapshot, the new iteration might not make these breakthroughs. Or might decide not to offer them.”

“Why are you telling us all this, Hugh?” Will asked.

“I don’t know when simple security measures turned into secrecy on this project, and I don’t think it’s the best strategy. If something tanks, it would be better if you knew what we were doing at the time so you could avoid that mistake, y’know?”

I nodded slowly. “It’s what I’d do.”

“It’s what we did do with Heaven’s River,” Bob interjected. “I’m a little surprised it’s even a question.”

“Agreed. Look, I’ll keep a channel open on the down-low, keep you up to date as much as I can.” Hugh paused and looked into the distance for a moment. “Right now, it looks like the board has made a decision. We’re going to rewind and try again, but we’ll take a current snapshot first in case we want to go back to this iteration later.”

Hugh stood, smiled to everyone, and popped out.

“We are not amused,” Garfield grumbled.